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Category: NEXT: An Empowerment Series

Attorney and life coach Susan Koenig guides, supports, and inspires you on the journey of creating a life you love.

NEXT: An Empowerment Series

Attorney and life coach Susan Koenig guides, supports, and inspires you on the journey of creating a life you love.

When You Remember It’s You Too

I felt a hand on my right breast. I sat up abruptly, frightened. My fear quickly turned to relief as I realized the hand was my own. Just a bad dream. The week before I had spent an entire day of my otherwise beautiful California vacation captivated and crushed as I watched the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Supreme Court nomination. Thereafter I watched for news updates on my phone, read my copy of The New York Times, and remembered. I remembered the familiar feelings. Of shock. Of disbelief. Of sorrow. This was not the first time. By the
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The Company I Keep

“I live a charmed life,” I say as the weekend came to a close. “It’s the company you keep,” she teases back. For close to 30 years Gretchen has gathered a group of women to her lake home to honor autumn’s start. Pumpkins, pots of chili, and piles of pillows greet us upon our arrival. We prepare by packing away our phones and putting on our comfiest clothes. Karla brings the red Twizzlers. I bring the red wine. No one spends much time talking about the Big Red football game. We are here for the company we keep. The company
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Hurt Heart Healed

“You’re not going to have your mother’s heart problems,” he said with confidence. My exam complete, I left the office assured I would not face years of living with heart disease. This week my oldest child turned 35, the same age as my brother Tim when he died. The love in my heart for my child makes it impossible for me to comprehend how my mother ever got out of bed again after Tim’s death. She was my best teacher of a resilient heart. Research has long shown that stress, grief, and fear  literally damage hearts. As our “fight or
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Later Lessons Learned

“No point arguing”  he would say calmly. My litigation skills gave me a distinct advantage.  No need for him to tell me I was wrong.  He simply showed me. John and I loved each other. We shared deeply held values. We also approached life differently, and I had a lot to learn. On Fridays, John joined friends for a happy hour. I eked out a few more emails after everyone left the office for the weekend. I silently claimed the moral superiority of a staunch work ethic. “You’re welcome to join me,” he would say when he headed to our
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Empowering Path Partners

I’ve always loved law students. Their intelligence. Their enthusiasm. Their commitment. I taught law as an adjunct for close to a decade. A single guest lecture I gave on domestic violence at another law school  led me to a law student who would change my life: Angela Dunne. I would become her employer, her mentor, her coach. She would become my role model, my teacher, and the manager of our law firm. When Angela and I met for the first time at the Flatiron Café her plucky attitude enabled her to ask for what she wanted before the dessert menu
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International Inspiration

First she called the police. Then airport security. For hours she had tried to reach her husband. Her two year old, who had never spent a night away from her, was on a plane headed out of the country. The text telling her of the abduction of her only child to an unknown location in the United States said: “More info later.” Her husband, who had changed the locks on the house and taken their son from day care to the airport, instructed her to “not take any irrational actions.” It took ten days for Nahoko to locate her child
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Surprising Scares

It was dark when I headed out. No one knew where I was or where I was going. Alone on my pre-dawn jog, I could have disappeared and it would have taken about four hours before anyone would notice. Last spring I ignored my friend’s advice to “stay on the trail where you can see people” when I went for a run among April azaleas. I don’t hesitate to walk under a poorly lit underpass at night, rationalizing that it’s only a few yards. It’s not that I’m a thrill seeker. It’s just that I can squash a cockroach with
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Evolution Unfolding

A warmhearted melancholy washes over me as I stare out the window. Eighteen years ago this month I returned to the neighborhood of my childhood to begin a new chapter of my life. Today I taste the bittersweetness of my life as I sip my first cup of dark roast in the newly opened coffee shop. I’m surrounded by tall ceilings, brick walls and laptops as I admire the view from the window. I’m in Little Bohemia on South 13th Street. It was the heart of the Czech immigrants with Little Italy being its cozy neighbor. My family moved to
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Thrilled

Do you remember a time when you would have been thrilled to have what you have now? When I returned home from a spring semester of college in Barcelona I weighed close to twenty pounds more than I had when I left. I had spent days walking on cobblestone streets, exploring medieval monasteries and hiking up hills in the Pyrenees. But the months of living on a student loan diet of bread and cheese took its toll. The day I walked of the plane and my family saw me, my five foot two self would have been thrilled to weigh
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Life and Death Stories

The stories kept coming. For two hours a non-stop stream of people paid their condolences to the young widow as she stood in front of her wife’s slate gray coffin covered with white lilies and white roses. One by one they told their story of meeting, what meant the most, and the loss they grieved. After the visitation, the stories continued on the back patio with the sound of August cicadas and more than one bottle of wine selected from the cellar without care as to whether it was the finest or the cheapest. “Remember the time when she…?”  “How
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